THE LONG IMPRISONMENT
Ralegh's efforts to avert complete ruin--True greatness--Keeps
in touch with life--First two years--The history--The first
sentence--Reasons for incompleteness--James's dislike of the
work--Its greatness.
Such things happened in actual life at the beginning of the seventeenth
century. There was the same fantastic blending in life of melodrama and
farce and poetry as was shown upon the stage. Beaumont and Fletcher,
wild and exaggerated as they often appear, gave as faithful a picture of
the life around them as Bernard Shaw gives of modern life; and in some
ways they gave a more faithful picture, for they had no principle which
they desired to inculcate, and a principle, though it is a fine
stimulant, is apt to be a sad distortioner. There exactly lies the
salient point of contrast between that century and modern times. Life
then was confined and intense--with limitless possibilities. The pageant
passed compact, and yet in gorgeous disarray. Art was informed by its
positive spirit; glowed with animation at its touch. Life has become
vast and voluminous; its horizon seems limited, as though for a time it
had outgrown its strength, and was sprawling. The pageant crawls by in
its interminable length, and yet in dully determined order. Art lives by
battling against its dreadful hold--the hold that slowly fastens and
stifles with its long, persistent tentacles. The apathy of convention
gradually settled, like an obscuring mist, but new knowledge is
scattering the mist like a wind, and knowledge brings new
responsibilities and fresh life and fresh light. The sun peers through
the clouds, and the sun will lend warmth and colour to the pageant.
But such things happened at the beginning of the seventeenth century in
actual life. That farce at the scaffold was the first manifestation that
King James gave in England of his royal power.
Ralegh was taken from Winchester to the Tower on December 16. His future
life was now dreadfully apparent to him. His lot was confinement. But
not yet was his indomitable spirit of life dead. Crushed he felt and
pinioned, but still he was obliged to strain every nerve to force all
that could be forced from the life that henceforward awaited him. He
could not submit in proud, becoming silence, as a fabled hero would
undoubtedly have done, and as the code of present honour would have him
submit--a code which, it is well to remember, is considerably assisted
in its conduct by the press.
The only possibility of living with any pretence of decency lay in the
favour of other men, who must on no account be permitted to forget him.
It is unwise to praise the work which he accomplished in captivity, and
to censure him for employing the only possible means in his power to get
that work accomplished.
Again he put all his strength into the only task left him, and he
succeeded in saving something from the ruin of his estates and the
complete curtailment of his liberty, by renewed supplication. Being a
man of vivid imagination, he entered so completely into the part which
was forced upon him--the part of supplicator--that his letters are the
letters of the broken man that he wished to appear, and that his future
work proved conclusively he was not. How little his spirit was broken is
seen from the tremendous work which he undertook, and from the personal
influence which he continued to exercise, and which his imprisonment did
not seem to lessen. The scope of his activity was limited, but his
activity did not abate.
His letters of supplication throw a light upon the nature of a great
man. They show something of that strange quality which men call
greatness. Ralegh was not a little man magnified by position or
circumstances. He was a great man. Not in success is greatness apparent,
not in attainment, but in effort, in vitality, in power of feeling and
in control--but essentially in power of feeling. That power broke even
the barrier of Ralegh's immense self-control--for a time only.
A great man does not walk exalted, like some demi-god to whom all things
are easy; he knows dismay, he knows weakness, and all the legion of
infirmities, but in spite of all, he wrests from life what life must
yield him.
Ralegh had lost the Governorship of Jersey, the Patent of the Wine
Office, the Wardenship of the Stannaries, the Rangership of Gillingham
Forest, and the Lieutenancy of Portland Castle, from which together he
drew an income of L3000 a year; men to whom he owed money fastened upon
his estate at Sherborne. It was to save Sherborne from them that he did
his utmost. Lord Cecil came to his assistance: "A secound effect of your
Lordship's great favor was the preservation of my moveabells, which the
ravenus Sherifs were in hand to have seised, and att my gates to have
rifled, if your Lordship's letters had not then cum to have
countermanded it; which it also pleased yow, soon after, to procure me."
But Ralegh's possession of Sherborne was temporary and uncertain. He
tried to save it entirely from the ruin of his fortune, that his wife
and children might have a place in which to live. On this subject he
writes continually to Cecil and Lord Cranborne. Sorrow sat by him as he
wrote, and for long and long he could not resign himself to the prospect
of captivity. "If I had a pardon, I may notwithstanding be restraynd or
confined. If I may not be here about London (which God caste my sowle
into hell if I desire, but to do your Lordship some kind of service) I
shalbe most contented to be confined within the Hundred of Sherburn; or
if I cannot be allowed so much I shalbe contented to live in Holland,
wher, I shall perchance gett some imployment uppon the Indies, or else,
if I be apoyncted to any bishope or other gentelman or nobelman, or that
your Lordship would lett me keep but a park of yours--which I will buy
from some one that hath it--your Lordship shalbe sure that I will never
break the order which you shall pleas to undertake for me. And, if I bee
any wher nire yow, yow shall find that in sume kind or other I shall do
your Lordship service. For God douth know that if I cannot go to the
Bathe this fall I am undun, for my health; and shalbe dead, or disabled
for ever."
He wrote to Viscount Cranborne, imploring his aid to preserve this
remnant of his fortune. "That life which cann be of no use to others and
is now also weery of mee, at parting putts mee in mind of thos whom
Nature and Charetie commands me not to neglect--a wife and a childe, and
a wife with childe, whom, God knowes, have nothing else to inherite then
my shame and ther own misery. How to healp it or to whom to complain, I
know not, whose fortune is over darck for the reason of the world to
peirce.... And while I know that the best of men are but the spoyles of
Tyme and certayne images wherwith childish Fortune useth to play--kisse
them to-day and break them to-morrow--and therefore can lament in my
sealf but a common destiney, yet the pitifull estate of thos who are
altogether healpless and who dayly wound my sowle with the memory of
their miseries, force mee in despite of all resolvednesse, bothe to
bewayle them and labor for them.... For my own tyme, good my Lord
consider that it cannot be calde a life, but only misery drawne out and
spoone into a long thride without all hope of other end then Death shall
provide for mee; who without the healp of kings or frinds, will deliver
me out of prison."
The humiliation of his position was forced upon his notice, for little
men began to cheat him in little ways, and he could find no redress. The
law knew him but as dead. He writes to Levinus Muncke, secretary to Lord
Cranborne.... "I solde of late two peeces of ordenance to one Mr.
Aloblaster, a marchant, whome you knowe. Hee that made the bargayne
between us was one Thomas Scott, a broker,--one that I have done much
for in my tyme, and one that, since I came back from Winchester, offred
to sell his howse for me, if I wanted, with protestations too shamless
to be dissembled. But having gotten my mony into his hands which Mr.
Aloblaster sent mee and five pound waight of tobacco, hath sold the
tobacco and reteyneth my money; finding mee now fitt for all men to
tread on."
The man jackal is more impatient than his animal brother. For nearly two
years Ralegh beat against the prison walls, bruising himself, unable to
give up hope that some measure of freedom might be his. His health
failed. The plague broke out in the Tower. A woman with the plague on
her slept in the next room to his eldest son, with only a partition of
paper between them. Every trouble and annoyance fell upon him.
Indifference could not come to him with its peace of apathy. He
continued to live and to resent and to suffer. A weaker man would have
broken down, would have given up this horrible struggle for existence
against such overwhelming odds. Ralegh did not. And slowly he emerged
from the struggle the conqueror even of these circumstances. He found
work and worked. At first he obtained permission to turn a little
disused hen-house that leant against a wall in the Tower into a
laboratory. He made lotions and a medicine, which remained in constant
use for very many years after his death. In modern times that alone
would have been sufficient to give him the prestige of millions, and
probably with a little discreet management, a peerage.
Few men have turned necessity to gain (that is the quality of the
warrior in life) so greatly as Ralegh, such constricting necessity to
such glorious gain. By sheer will power he kept in touch with the life,
from which he was excluded. He wrote pamphlets on questions that were
paramount in interest. His treatise on _The Prerogative of Parliaments_
shows him in the vanguard of the fighters for liberty of thought, before
that movement developed into a baser servitude. He wrote arguments
against an alliance by marriage with Spain. He wrote at Prince Henry's
request a treatise on the building and management of ships. In every
sphere his presence was felt. Ladies were eager to use his lotions for
the preservation of beauty. His medicine was famous. The Queen sent an
urgent messenger to the Tower when the Prince was dying, thinking to
save her son's life by its means. But it was too late. The medicine only
served to alleviate the agony of his last moments.
So Ralegh gradually came to arrange his life according to its new
limitations. And it came about that those years in the Tower were far
from being the unhappiest in his life. Ralegh, like his friend Spenser
who had died tragically a few years before his imprisonment, knew well
the value of Court life; and though he was not cut off from intelligent
society as completely in the Tower as Spenser was in Ireland; yet he was
cut off from much that had no attraction to Spenser. But in spite of his
disgrace, and in spite of the work he desired to do, he must surely have
found something of the same peace that comforted Spenser among the
savage Irish, before their outbreak took from him his wife and home and
all that was dear to him on earth. There is a strange analogy in what
life offered to the two men. Lady Ralegh was allowed to visit and stay
with her husband, until she offended Waad, who had become governor, by
driving into the courtyard of the Tower in her carriage. Then the
privilege was curtailed. Ralegh had many visitors. Men who had returned
from travels came to tell him their experiences; men who were starting
on some voyage, came to ask his advice and listen to his counsel. Ben
Jonson visited him, and other scholars and poets. Certainly gossiping
cheery Coryat, who amused himself by walking through all countries of
the world, would come and recount his experiences. The Odcombian leg
stretcher, as he liked to call himself, was hail-fellow-well-met with
every man in London and in the principal cities of Europe. A sort of
standing amiable joke was Tom of Odcombe. "There is no man but to enjoy
his company would neglect anything but business."
For two years he turned in prison as in a cage. Then he began to live.
His mind expanded beyond the limits of body and his discomfort and of
himself. Some sort of expression must be found for his mind's activity,
and his means of expression were limited. As health came to him while he
worked in his laboratory the proper expression for his mind's activity
evolved itself. During the months of his retreat in Ireland, in his
cabin as he made his way across the silent sea, he had read deeply and
thought deeply about the past; in his active life at the Court and
elsewhere he had known men who made history, and he had taken part in
events which were history. He had seen and conversed with men whom
civilization had not touched, he had known men of every country whom
civilization had shaped to its culminating point; and now as he lived in
the Tower from which he could see the ships sailing down the Thames to
the unknown lands, from which he could look down upon the busy men of
London, slowly there formed itself in his great mind a project. The
project was to write the history of the whole great world, from which he
was now cut off, from its very beginnings down to the days in which he
was living, aloof from the life around. He determined to write the
History of the World. That was the proper expression for his great
mind's activity. He felt unconsciously that in so doing he could express
himself. He set to work. He felt he had the grip of everything from the
creation of the world to his own birth and tempestuous life of more than
fifty years. We have burrowed more deeply into the mystery of things
than the great Elizabethan, as sublimely unaware of his ignorance, as
we are of ours; he had complete confidence in his knowledge. We
hesitate, we feel always on the brink of some great discovery, to which
acquired knowledge is leading us. He explored continents, feeling
limitless possibilities of the earth; and doubted not about the
spiritual world. We know the limits of the earth; and explore these
spiritual worlds, the mystery of existence. Therein lies the difference
between two ages; therein without a boast, lies the progress, even,
which has happened in the last three hundred years of man's existence.
The adventurous whom the Unknown attracts are not drawn to explore the
earth's surface; they turn towards the mystery of their own souls from
which comes much profitless self-searching and a little eternal gain;
they turn towards the mysteries of life and death and birth; they try to
unravel the skein which men were then living tempestuously to entangle.
So Ralegh began his great work, greatly conceived and greatly executed,
in the very spirit of the age to which he belonged--the age of
Elizabeth, and to which King James's little favourites, Car and the
rest, could never belong. Shut away from the bustle of the court and its
splendour, now sinking to ignoble display; shut away from the voice of
the nation, singing after the nation's deeds, as it had never sung
before and has not sung since, he dreamed his great dream and found
peace as he forced it to take shape and reality to his vision. From the
creation of the world to the death of his own great Queen
Elizabeth--everything that was--that was his subject; nothing less could
satisfy him. He set the huge machinery of his idea slowly to work. His
authorities were vast in number. He searched them all, and began to
write. As he wrote the first sentences, he felt the world lay before
his ken, outstretched with all its strange happenings, the rise and the
fall of dynasties, the rise and fall of kingdoms and nations. All were
within his knowledge and grip. And above he saw the God, who had called
the world into existence, and man into being. About that God he writes
his first paragraph, untroubled by any simian suspicions. The immense
power of the man overawes you as you begin his tremendous task. That is
the first impression, and the impression thrills, as every supreme
evidence of man's power must. Then you realize that his whole vision of
the world is wrong--is a myth, and you see the futility of man's
power--that is the second impression. The two are singularly vivid; they
clash splendidly--and the issue? You see limitless possibilities of life
for the brave man and the strong man, as they only can be seen, when two
ideas--two sincerities--have clashed splendidly.
"And on through brave wars waged."
One is feign to cry out, when the dream of things has passed.
The first sentence of the History should be read aloud with a great
voice in a cathedral.
"God, whom the wisest men acknowledge to be a Power uneffable and vertue
infinite, a Light by abundant charitie invisible; an Understanding which
itself can only comprehend, an essence eternal and spiritual, of
absolute purenesse and simplicitie; was and is pleased to make himself
knowne by the work of the World: in the wonderful magnitude whereof (all
which Hee imbraceth, filleth, and sustayneth) we behold the Image of
that glorie which cannot be measured, and withall that one and yet
universal Nature, which cannot be defined. In the glorious Lights of
Heaven, we perceive a shadow of his divine Countenance; in his
mercifull provision for all that live, his manifold goodness, and lastly
in creating and making existent the World universall, by the absolute
Arte of his owne Word, his Power and Almightinesse; which Power Light
Vertue Wisdome and Goodnesse, being all but attributes of one simple
Essence and one God, we in all admire, and in part discern, per speculam
creaturaram, that is in the disposition, order, and varietie of
Celestiall and Terrestriall bodies: Terrestriall, in their strange and
manifold diversities: Celestiall in their beautie and magnitude; which
in their continuall and contrary motions are neither repugnant,
intermixt nor confounded. By these potent effects we approch to the
knowledge of the Omnipotent cause, and by these motions, their Almightie
mover."
The History is based upon a fallacy; but the History is written in great
prose--the prose of Ralegh. Even when the subject comes from remote
authorities on antedeluvian epochs, it is shaped and filled with
perpetual life by contact with the great living personality of Ralegh.
Error in life or art matters little. It is vitality that matters.
Mr. Edmund Gosse remarks that "the entire absence of humour is
characteristic.... The story of Periander's burning the clothes of the
women closes with a jest; there is, perhaps, no other occasion on which
the solemn historian is detected with a smile upon his lips." The remark
is almost as astounding as that of Mr. Edwards, who, after a careful
summary of the History, is obliged to say, "The three or four thousand
pages of the _History of the World_ contain, I believe, no line or word
within which there lies the tiniest spark of prurient suggestion." Mr.
Edwards is, of course, pleased at this; but there is no reason for Mr.
Gosse's lament. Ralegh did not write with the continual bubble of
humour which makes the Church History of Great Britain (of all
impossible subjects) endeavoured by that inimitable old Thomas Fuller,
one of the wittiest and most readable books in the language. Humour
constantly occurs. Two instances in one paragraph are quite
unforgetable. It is the fourth paragraph of the twenty-third chapter of
the second book of the first part of the History (what portentous
dimensions the book has!).
"Touching all that was said before of Phul Belosus, for the proving that
Phul and Belosus were not sundry Kings, Joseph Scaliger pities their
ignorance that have spent their labour to little purpose. Honest and
painefull men he confesseth that they were, who by their diligence might
have won the good liking of their Readers had they not by mentioning
Annius his Authors given such offence that men refused thereupon to
reade their Bookes and Chronologies. A short answere.
"For mine owne part, howsoever, I believe nothing that Annius his
Berosus, Metasthenes, and others of that stampe affirme, in respect of
their bare authority; yet am I not so squeamish, but that I can well
enough digest a good Booke, though I finde the wordes of one or two of
these good fellows alleaged in it: I have (somewhat peradventure too
often) already spoken my mind of Annius, his Authors.... Neither indeed
are those honest and painfull men (as Scaliger tearmes them, meaning if
I mistake him not; good silly fellowes) who set down the Assyrian Kings
from Pul forwards as Lords also of Babylon, taking Pul for Belosus and
Salmanassar for Nabonassar, such writers as a man should be ashamed or
unwilling to reade."
In such a passage even a student of Ralegh can see not only his lips
smile, but his eyes twinkle with humour, which is a characteristic of
their solemn historian. And he ends the paragraph by recounting a
singularly pertinent and amusing jest.
"Therefore the fictions (or let them be called conjectures) painted in
Maps doe serve only to mislead such discoverers as rashly beleeve them;
drawing upon the publishers eyther some angry curses or well deserved
scorne.... To which purpose I remember a pretie jest of Don Pedro de
Sarmiento, a worthy Spanish Gentleman who had been employed by his King
in planting a Colonie upon the Streights of Magellan; for when I asked
him being then my Prisoner, some question about an Island in those
Streights which me thought, might have done eyther benefit or
displeasure to his enterprise, he told me merrily that it was to be
called the Painters Wives Island; saying That whilest the fellow drew
that Map, his Wife sitting by, desired to put in one Countrey for her;
that she, in imagination might have an island of her owne. But in
filling up the blankes of old Histories, wee need not be so scrupulous.
For it is not to be feared that time should runne backward, and by
restoring the things themselves to knowledge, make our conjectures
appeare ridiculous...."
But the great work was never brought to an end. The first immense half
of it, however, was finished, and that half is equal in bulk to about
thirty modern novels. Many traditions survive as to the reason which
caused Ralegh to discontinue his task. One is that Burr, the publisher,
complained of the loss which the production of the first folio involved,
and that Ralegh instantly laid hands on the heap of manuscript which lay
on the table before him and, laying it on the fire, pushed it deep into
the red embers with his foot, saying that no man should be the loser
through his work. Another is (and this commends itself to the
imagination of M. Anatole France) that Ralegh saw from his window two
men fighting in the courtyard below; that he asked the cause of the
quarrel and that, when two eye-witnesses gave him two essentially
different accounts, he was so overcome with the mystery that must ever
surround all truth, that he thereupon destroyed the remaining manuscript
of his History. These stories are interesting but not authentic enough
to carry any weight against the reason which Ralegh himself gives for
leaving his work unfinished, though they may possibly be reckoned among
the discouragements which he mentions. For these are his words:
"Lastly whereas this book by the title it hath, calls itselfe, The first
part of Generall Historie of the World, implying a Second and Third
Volume; which I also intended and have hewne out; besides many other
discouragements perswading my silence; it hath pleased God to take that
glorious Prince out of the world, to whom they were directed, whose
unspeakable and never enough lamented losse hath taught mee to say with
Job _Versa est in luctum Cithara mea, et Organum meum in vocem
flentium_."
James did not like the History. He did not consider that Ralegh bated
his breath sufficiently when writing of kings, who obtained their power,
in his opinion, directly from a divine source. And he went farther in
his dislike. For into what Ralegh had written of kings and men, long
dead, he read criticisms against himself and his favourites; and these
he could ill brook. James, like most cruel men, was sensitive, but he
was "sensitive within alone, Inly only thrilling shrewd;" where others
were concerned, he was, as is seen in his treatment of Ralegh, hard,
"scaly as in clefts of pine."
James had no real cause to do this. Certain it is that Ralegh never
consciously committed the offence. But certain it also is that he, like
any other writer of his calibre, would write with greater feeling the
account of some happening or some character, with which the
circumstances of his own life brought into sympathy. And exactly because
his life and his knowledge of men was profound and varied, his history
gains in vitality. For always he keeps his relation in contact with
life--that is of course to say, his own experience of life--by which
each man is limited--and never does his work degenerate into a mere
recital of facts. Only when he is weighing authority against authority
is he lifeless, and almost necessarily lifeless, but even then--witness
the passage quoted a little earlier in this chapter--he is not often
dull.
All through the length of the history, passage after passage of deep
wisdom and insight occur, so that his work is still a comment upon that
greatest and most enthralling of all mysteries--life.